Helium 10 vs Viral Launch: Which Is Best? (2023)
Helium 10 and Viral Launch are two of the most popular Amazon tools on the market. But which is better for your business?
In this article, we’ll compare Helium 10 vs Viral Launch so that you can make an informed decision about which will work better for your business.
We’ll discuss what makes them different and cover the pros and cons of each in detail.
By the end, you’ll have all the information needed to choose between these two top-tier Amazon seller tools.
In a hurry and want a quick summary?
Here’s our Helium 10 vs Viral Launch verdict at a glance:
PROS & CONS
PROS & CONS
Overall, we find that Helium 10 is the best value for money for most growing Amazon sellers.
Want a deeper dive into the differences between the two tools? Let’s get into it.
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What is Helium 10?
Helium 10 is a suite of Amazon tools that together allow you to research product ideas, analyze competition, create well-optimized Amazon listings, monitor inventory levels and automate your business.
Helium 10 also includes a handy Chrome extension which allows you to access insightful data, assess profitability and speed up time-consuming tasks when carrying out research on Amazon.
Founded by Manny Coats back in 2015, Helium 10 has since become one of the most popular Amazon seller tools in the world with over 1 million users and was acquired by eCommerce growth platform Assembly in 2019.
It’s a tool our team uses every day in growing our Amazon business and we’ve spent thousands of hours using it over recent years.
What is Viral Launch?
Viral Launch is a suite of tools designed to help you research, launch and optimize your products on Amazon.
It helps you discover profitable product ideas, analyze markets, target buyers with the right offers, and measure your performance.
It also has an extensive database that allows you to track average prices and sales velocity over time which can be invaluable when making decisions about your product launch.
Started by Amazon legend Casey Gauss, Viral Launch has been around since 2014 and, with over 100,000 users, is one of Helium 10’s biggest competitors in the Amazon seller tools space.
What Features Does Helium 10 Offer?
Helium 10 is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to be a one-stop shop for successful Amazon sellers.
Its tools can be summarized in these categories:
- Chrome extension
- Product research tools
- Keyword research tools
- Listing optimization tools
- Analytics tools
- Marketing tools
- Operations tools
- Learning resources
Let’s take a brief look at each one.
Helium 10’s Chrome Extension
The Helium 10 Chrome extension helps Amazon sellers save a huge amount of time with product research.
When installed, the Chrome extension overlays helpful data such as BSR, estimated sales volume, and sales trends on both product pages and search results pages.
You can also load the Chrome extension on search results pages to see estimated monthly sales revenue, average price and other summarized sales data to help find profitable product niches quickly.
The Chrome extension also provides a product evaluation score which attempts to quickly give the user an idea of how much potential there is within that particular market.
Finally, the other tools such as the profitability calculator and ASIN grabber really help speed up product research.
This is a must-have Chrome extension!
Helium 10’s Product Research Tools
Every Amazon private label seller starts their journey with product research, and as such Helium 10 makes this a core of its offering with its Black Box tool.
Inside Black Box, you can filter through the vast amount of products selling on Amazon to look for potential opportunities.
It allows you to filter by sales volume, review count, price, and many other metrics.
You can search by individual product, across keywords, niches, and also competitors.
You can also check if a product is trending to make sure demand is moving in the right direction and you don’t jump on a fad (fidget spinners, anyone?).
Overall, Black Box is a very robust product research tool and is one of the most popular in the market.
Helium 10’s Keyword Research Tools
Once you’ve found a product to sell, the next key for Amazon sellers is to get that product in front of hungry buyers.
The most critical part of that process is keyword research, and Helium 10 has a number of different features to help find relevant high-volume keywords.
On Helium 10, keyword research starts with Magnet – a simple tool that allows you to enter any seed keyword and find a large list of related keywords that you can use when optimizing your listing or creating PPC campaigns.
In addition, it also has an additional tool called Cerebro, a reverse ASIN lookup tool.
This allows you to enter up to 10 ASINs from Amazon and discover high-ranking keywords for these products along with associated search volume, much like a competitor keyword spy.
As a result, you can carry out highly targeted keyword research very quickly making this one of Helium 10’s best, most useful tools when growing an Amazon FBA business.
Helium 10’s Listing Optimization Tools
Helium 10’s very first tool – Scribbles – was built for listing optimization.
This tool has since been significantly updated and is now called Listing Builder.
It helps Amazon sellers write optimized listing by giving keyword coverage recommendations – i.e. ensuring all relevant keywords appear in your listing.
It also connects with your Amazon Seller Central account to push updates directly.
Helium 10 also offers a range of additional listing optimization tools, including:
- Frankenstein – to help clean up and de-duplicate keyword lists ready for listing writing.
- Listing Analyzer – to help understand where listings can be better optimized.
- Index Checker – to check if an existing listing is indexed for relevant keywords.
Some do argue these are minor additions that carry out tasks easily achieved elsewhere (eg. Frankenstein’s functionality can be replicated in Excel), however, it can be helpful to have these tools all in one place.
Overall, the listing optimization tools inside Helium 10 are up there with the best.
Helium 10’s Analytics Tools
Helium 10 has a range of tools with accurate data that help you analyze and improve performance:
- Market tracking. ‘Market Tracker’ allows you to monitor trends and performance in a whole niche over time.
- Keyword tracking. The ‘Keyword Tracker‘ tool gives regular updates on where products rank in search results for chosen keywords – a crucial aspect of an Amazon business.
- Profit tracking. The ‘Profits’ tool in Helium 10 gives real-time data in a much more helpful way than Seller Central. It breaks down revenues, expenses and profits to give a clear picture of how you’re performing and how you can improve.
Helium 10’s Marketing Tools
Helium 10 continues to show great strength in this category with three tools – Adtomic, Portals, and Attribution.
Adtomic is a full-feature Amazon PPC tool that allows sellers to create, optimize and automate PPC campaigns. The design is slick, and overall the tool is easy to use and helps save a lot of time managing campaigns.
Portals is a landing page builder that helps sellers build an audience post-purchase through email opt-ins, and the Attribution tool works with Amazon Attribution to measure the effectiveness of external traffic you’re sending to Amazon listings.
For the price of the Helium 10 suite, these advanced advertising tools really do help add a lot of ‘bang for your buck’.
Helium 10’s Operations Tools
Helium 10 offers a range of operational tools that help Amazon sellers streamline their workflow and hit objectives.
Its Inventory Management tool helps you forecast stock levels and create purchase orders to send to suppliers helping you avoid ever going out of stock.
It also has an inventory protector tool to help you avoid coupon abuse and Refund Genie to help you claim refunds on products Amazon has lost or damaged in their warehouses.
Finally, there is an Alerts tool to notify you of any changes to your Amazon listings, and Follow-up – an automated email response tool to help you communicate with customers and get more reviews.
Helium 10’s Learning Resources
Helium 10 made a big move in the Amazon tool space when bringing FBA legend Kevin King on board to deliver the ‘Freedom Ticket’ course.
Every Helium 10 subscriber now gets access to this course which features regular updates and insights from a range of guest contributors.
The in-tool support is also very good and helps Amazon sellers learn how to best use the tools for ongoing success.
Overall, the Helium 10 tool suite is high-quality and helps manage many aspects of an Amazon business.
The user experience is very good and there is 24/7 customer support which really helps if you ever have questions.
What Features Does Viral Launch Offer?
Like Helium 10, Viral Launch offers a range of tools to help you be a successful brand builder on Amazon.
The tools Viral Launch has to offer can be broken down into these categories:
- Chrome extension
- Product research
- Keyword research tools
- Listing optimization tools
- Analytics tools
- Marketing tools
- Operations tools
- Product launch tools
Let’s briefly review each category.
Viral Launch’s Chrome Extension
The Viral Launch Chrome extension utilizes its Market Intelligence tool and allows you to access insightful data on product pages and in search results on Amazon, speeding up your research process.
It claims to have ‘most accurate sales estimates and product trends, built upon real-time and historical data from billions of real Amazon data points.‘
It also has an FBA calculator built in and overall is very comparable to Helium 10’s offering.
Viral Launch’s Product Research Features
Viral Launch has three main tools for product research.
The Product Discovery tool is very similar to Helium 10’s Black Box and helps sellers filter and search for new product ideas by uncovering which products are performing best in a certain niche.
You can search by product, keyword, brand or category.
The Viral Launch Market Intelligence tool also reveals market trends and insights that can help you make informed decisions about which products to launch or update.
Finally, the ‘Competitor Intelligence’ tool is a competitor insights tool that shows you what the most successful sellers in a market are are doing so you can stay ahead of the competition.
For product research, Viral Launch is right up there with Helium 10.
Viral Launch’s Keyword Research Tools
The Viral Launch ‘Keyword Research’ tool helps you identify and optimize keywords that will increase organic visibility and rankings.
To use the keyword research tool, you simply enter a root keyword and the tool will give you a long list of related keywords.
You can then sort these keywords by search volume, relevancy, and a ‘priority score’ to help you include the most important keywords in your listing.
When looking at a Helium 10 vs Viral Launch comparison in this category, Viral Launch does come up a little short without a reverse ASIN search tool.
Viral Launch’s Listing Optimization Tools
Viral Launch’s ‘Listing Builder’ tool helps you optimize your Amazon listing for organic visibility and conversions by showing which keywords to include.
It offers a ‘Listing Analyzer’ feature which scores every element of your listing from product images to description, then suggests changes that could help improve your rankings.
This is another category that both tools match up pretty well.
Viral Launch’s Analytics Tools
This is a category where, truthfully, Viral Launch comes up a little short.
The argument may well be that more focus on fewer tools makes those tools more powerful.
But when investing in an all-in-one tool suite, to not have analytics like a profits dashboard is a bit of a let down.
However, Viral Launch does have ‘Keyword Manager’ – a helpful keyword tracker tool which shows trending data and organic ranking of chosen keywords.
Viral Launch’s Marketing Tools
Much like Helium 10’s Adtomic, Viral Launch has its own PPC automation software offering called ‘Kinetic’.
Kinetic allows you to manage campaigns, analyze performance, and create time-saving automations.
A Viral Launch plan also includes access to Listing Dojo, its free split testing tool that tests on variant – such as a main image – against another in order to make data-driven optimization decisions.
Helium 10 has PickFu integrated into its platform, but Listing Dojo is a more traditional split testing tool and helps Viral Launch stay strong in the marketing category.
Viral Launch’s Operations Tools
Viral Launch has clearly avoided the temptation to offer a tool for every scenario as it doesn’t feature any dedicated operations tools.
There’s nothing like Helium 10’s Refund Genie tool, inventory protector or inventory management.
Viral Launch’s Product Launch Tools
Having got its start through innovating in the product launch space, Viral Launch continues to offer a dedicated tool just for new launches.
However, the method of launching new products continues to be using discounted codes to Viral Launch’s pool of buyers.
This method of launching a product has not been particularly effective for a number of years and makes this tool more of an extra than a valuable tool.
All in all, Viral Launch is strong in the areas of product research and marketing, but when comparing the range of tools in a Helium 10 vs Viral Launch comparison, Helium 10 is more comprehensive.
Helium 10 Pricing
Helium 10 has a free plan that lasts forever.
However, there are restrictions placed on how much you can use each tool and you will quickly find yourself needing more capacity.
Therefore it’s recommended to try one of the three paid plans:
- Starter – $39/month.
- Platinum – $99/month.
- Diamond – $279/month.
Sign up for an annual plan and pay for 10 months instead of 12, PLUS get an extra 10% off with code BBU10 and save almost 30% in total.
Helium 10 Starter Plan
The free plan gives limited access to some of the more basic tools and is only really suitable for Amazon sellers just starting out.
It doesn’t give access to important tools like Follow-Up for review request automation, so upgrading to Platinum from the free plan is highly recommended.
Helium 10 Platinum Plan
The platinum plan is the most popular as it gives access to almost every tool and comes with usage limits that are more than enough for the average Amazon seller.
The only limitation with Platinum is it doesn’t give full access to Adtomic, the PPC automation tool.
Once you hit enough revenue to justify it ($10k/month+) then upgrading to Diamond is well worth it.
Helium 10 Diamond Plan
Diamond brings with it a big uptick in usage limits plus full access to the automation features of Adtomic.
Given you can get a generous discount on this plan – and save even more by switching to an annual plan – it is well worth it for growing sellers.
Viral Launch Pricing
Like Helium 10, Viral Launch has its own free plan. It works slightly differently in that you get full access to the tools but on a limited 14-day trial.
Beyond that, it offers three pricing tiers:
- Essentials – $69/month
- Pro – $99/month
- Pro Plus Ads – $199/month
Viral Launch Essentials Plan
The Essentials plan includes everything you need to get started including a robust product research tool, Amazon keyword research tool, accurate search volume estimates and a handy browser extension.
Viral Launch Pro Plan
Upgrading to the Viral Launch Pro plan gives additional access to features such as monthly revenue and price trends in the product discovery tool and listing optimization features.
Viral Launch Pro Plus Ads Plan
Upgrading to the Pro Plus plan gives you access to Kinetic, Viral Launch’s powerful PPC tool, along with dedicated PPC customer support.
At $199 per month, this comes in as slightly more cost-effective when comparing Helium 10 vs Viral Launch.
Helium 10 vs Viral Launch: Pros & Cons
Both options in the Helium 10 vs Viral Launch comparison are strong. However, they each have a number of pros and cons, so let’s take a quick look at them.
Helium 10 Pros
Helium 10 Cons
Viral Launch Pros
Viral Launch Cons
Viral Launch vs Helium 10: Which Is Better?
Helium 10 and Viral Launch are both excellent tools for Amazon sellers, but they each have their own unique pros and cons.
Helium 10 is an all-inclusive suite of features with accurate data and great training resources, although the higher plans can be more expensive than Viral Launch’s pricing.
Meanwhile, Viral Launch has powerful product research capabilities along with split testing options that Helium 10 lacks but doesn’t have the same range of tools in its suite.
Ultimately, it comes down to what fits your budget best as well as which features you need most in order to succeed on Amazon.
For most sellers, Helium 10 will be the stand-out option, but both software tools offer a free trial so be sure to check them both out and see which best meets your needs.
Helium 10 offers a more comprehensive tool suite that will help you grow a bigger Amazon business faster. Viral Launch is a solid option but doesn’t quite have the same range of features as Helium 10.
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